@fifteen3 and I were talking about this a little on IRC today, but I thought I'd bring this up on a less ephemeral channel.

One of the organizers of DevOpsDays Toronto put out a plug during his talk to call for speakers at the monthly meetup, DevOpsTO. What caught my attention is that he directed people to https://www.papercall.io, which is a free service specifically for handling CFP submission processes.

I had a chance to ask him a bit about it later, and he said he hasn't really been using it long enough yet to decide whether it is effective, but so far he's use it for at least one meetup, and had all the speaker slots filled, so that's a good start.

I'm not that married to the idea of using this particular service, but it might be a good idea to solidify a process for managing speaker proposals. It might help reduce the barrier to getting submissions, and make it easier on organizers.

The one month that I tried to organize DevTricks (admittedly, it was January, everyone was busy from the holidays, and it was a snow storm), I had one speaker, and I didn't even know he wanted to talk until he walked in the door. It was difficult to try and arrange speakers without already having the network of potential speakers that the regular organizers had.

Some of the problems a solid CFP process could solve:

centralizing talk submissions would help a lot if organizers take turns from month to month

reduced overheard for scheduling speakers

lower barrier to entry for speakers to sign up (right now that might not be sure who to talk to, or how to contact us)

gives us some place to send people for instructions if they are thinking of speaking

We used to use threads on this forum where we'd announce the event with three empty spots. Then, people would ask to take a spot in the thread or we would find someone to take a spot via other means. Either way, as we filled spots, we'd edit the original post to fill out the schedule.

I think we could just continue doing that. Maybe I'm missing something, but I fail to see why we'd need a more rigorous process like PaperCall.

@knicklabs I agree based on how we currently find presenters for DevTricks the way we have done it is sufficient.

@nbering raised a good point about people having conversations about a topic they might want to present and that conversation not being captured for all of the community to know about; we can support that person.

The example being that Person X (who has not presented before) talks to Adam about some topic and Adam says that would be great can I slot you in for next month and Person X says I am not ready but get back to me in 2 months. So Adam goes to Japan for two months, and Nick is organizing a DevTricks and can't find presenters and doesn't know about Person X.

Essentially, papercall.io would si-CRM for potential talks.to be Person X would be directed by Adam to list their topic in papercall.io and any organizer could look it up for future DevTricks.

Still, I think that is overkill for DevTricks. We could use a forum post with a tag "future talk". However, some people are apprehensive about discussing in the open and papercall.io would help protect people from being exposed to comments before they are ready.

I do think we could come up with another event series that might be a more extended format that would have people presenting in a more conference style way and papercall.io might be useful for that.

As the community grows, creating a speaker series would be a subtle evolution.

Brock has a speaker series for the business school called "Terry O’Malley Lecture on Advertising and Marketing." I could see something like that drawing people from outside the community as well.

My response has been long. I think papercall.io is overkill but at the same time it is free and if we want to experiment with it, it can't hurt. We should be careful not to alienate someone that wants to present and doesn't want to use the software.

I agree with both of you. If the form is the way, that's fine. We were previously split across Facebook, Twitter, Eventbrite (followed by Meetup), and of course this forum. And the forum kind of fell out of disuse, likely because people seemed to be favouring Facebook.

Speaking of... forum topics are great for the call for speakers, but are probably not the best for sharing the event. With letting the meetup membership lapse, do we want to open up an event on Eventbrite and also cross-post to Facebook again?